the roots of Zionist desires to have a
             purely Jewish state. He uses the work of Nur Masalha to describe how the
             goal of eliminating Arabs from Palestine existed even in the times of
             Theodor Herzl.[2] In addition, Pappe wanted "to explore both the mechanism
             of the 1948 ethnic cleansing, and the cognitive system that allowed the
             world to forget, and enabled the perpetrators to deny, the crime the
             Zionist movement committed against the Palestinian people in 1948."[3] In
             his exploration, this historian has constructed a narrative that is highly
             controversial and has a thoroughly cynical and morally critical overtone
             that carries throughout the work. He is indeed correct that Arab sources,
             including oral ones, must be accounted for, however one must objectively
             read his work and scrutinize his sources in order to weed out the
             historical truth about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
             The basis of Pappe's entire book is that ethnic cleansing must be the
             new term to describe what happened in 1948 Palestine, thus in his first
             chapter he lays out the definition of this internationally condemned crime
             against humanity. His definition is quite clear, albeit from Wikipedia it
             is the most general and straightforward definition. The use of Wikipedia
             points to the wide audience Pappe is writing for, as he wants to appeal and
             relate to a non-academic understanding of the term. This contradicts the
             widely held perception that the refugee crisis of 1948 was a byproduct of
             war, and a result of panic and orders to depart by unprepared and under-
             equipped Palestinian leaders. Pappe argues very directly that the war
             itself and the fact that half of the Palestinian people have been displaced
             is the result of a very deliberate ethnic cleansing by Israeli leaders. He
             describe said leaders as, "a small group of people (Pappe) refers to in
             this book as the 'Consultancy', an ad-hoc cabal assembled solely for the...